Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

was filtering around the edges, touching the iron railings and the trash cans out front. He opened the door, closed his eyes and sighed.

“You know? It is really hard for me to focus on my work when…”

I decided to save him time and distraction and cut across him. “This will only take a couple of minutes, Chad, and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner you can get back to your studies.”

“Fine. Come in.”

He made way for us. We didn’t go through to the living room, we stayed in the hall. He spread his hands. “What?”

“After your row, you made it sound as though you and Celeste might be fixing things.”

He shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”

“Did she keep stuff here?”

“Yeah, she’d been doing that for a while. I think she was trying to move in. I told her...”

I interrupted him. “So when she went home Sunday. She didn’t take that stuff with her. She left it here.”

His face went blank. He hadn’t been expecting the question. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What did you do with that stuff?”

He frowned. “Well, after a few days, it was obvious she wasn’t coming back and she wasn’t answering my calls, so I boxed it up and stuck it in the basement.”

I could feel a hot pellet in my gut. I asked him the million dollar question. “Was her laptop among that stuff?”

He nodded. “Sure. She kept it here because she thought her freak of a brother was trying to read her mail.”

“We’re going to need to take that stuff away, Chad.”

“Knock yourselves out. I’m going to assume you have either authority or permission, and if you haven’t, I don’t want to know about it.” He pointed to a door in the wall under the stairs. “Key’s in the door. It’s a big box labeled ‘Celeste’. You’ll find it.”

The basement had a bare, concrete floor which was largely hidden by an accumulation of junk that had not quite descended to the status of trash. It covered the rear and the left-hand wall. There were a couple of sofas, a couple of chairs, a big dining table, and it was all buried under more crates and cartons than you could easily count. The crates and the cartons contained everything from books and magazines to old toys, ancient Nintendos, vinyl records, tennis rackets and baseball bats, plastic bags full of cassette tapes and an infinite number of receipts for everything imaginable. There was also dust, a washing machine, a dryer and an old fridge.

We made a plan of attack and worked methodically. The plan was to take everything that was on the left and rear of the room and put it on the front and left, item by item, until we found the carton with Celeste’s name on it. We cleared a sofa and two chairs and moved two years’ worth of receipts and invoices, essays, reports and magazines from on top and underneath the dining table to the back of the room before we eventually found it.

It was not a carton. It was a semi-transparent, plastic, IKEA storage crate with a blue lid, like a giant Tupperware box four feet long, three feet across and eighteen inches deep. It was sealed with packing tape, and across one of the strips of tape, her name was written in indelible black ink. I lifted it and carried it to the table. There, I cut the tape with my Swiss Army knife and we removed the lid.

It was mainly clothes: jeans, blouses, shirts and T-shirts, a Columbia University sweatshirt, several pairs of panties and a couple of bras, socks, a pair of Timberland boots. There was a copy of the Lord of the Rings, and also a copy of Albert Camus’ The Outsider. On the first page, there was a dedication to Celeste from Chad, dated two weeks before her death. I flipped through the pages and saw they were annotated in what seemed to be Chad’s handwriting. I handed it to Dehan, removed a pair of Levis from the crate and found the laptop with its power cable and wireless mouse.

We stood staring at it for a moment, then Dehan dropped the book by Camus and picked up the Lord of the Rings. She leafed through the first pages. “There’s no dedication on this one,” she said.

I shook my head. “Looks like he was trying to educate her.”

“There is more to Chad Norris than meets the eye. A touch of Professor Higgins.”

She dropped the big tome back in the crate and I resealed it. “Let’s get this back to the station and go through it.” As we climbed the stairs back up to the hall, I sang, softly, “Oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

Dehan snorted ahead of me. “Actually, Stone, I was referring to the play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, not the popular musical by Lerner and Loewe.”

“Sure you were. That’s because you are Eliza to my Professor Higgins.”

“Jerk.”

“See? Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“Jerk.”

When we reached the hall, I handed her the box and the keys to the Jag. “Give me five minutes, will you?” She made a question out of a frown and I said softly, “Guys stuff.”

I opened the door for her and she went out to the car. I closed the door and went into the living room. He was sitting at the dining table, staring down at an open book. He spoke without looking up.

“What can I do for you, Detective? There is no need to come and say goodbye.”

I leaned with my hands on the back of a chair, looking down at him. He sighed and looked up. I said, “Camus, The Outsider.”

“What of it?”

“Were you trying to tell her who you were? Or were you highlighting what you both